MES – Manufacturing Execution System Development Tools

The MES applications used to control the manufacturing business process execution are developed in the appropriate editor of theTRACE MODE® 6 Integrated development environment. Thus, the T-FACTORY.exe® 6 MES project is fully integrated with the enterprise control systems and the MES applications are based on the real time data.

For this purpose, the T-FACTORY manufacturing execution system offers:

describing material and energy flows;

linking the material resources with real time data from TRACE MODE HMI and SOFTLOGIC;

calculating material and energy balances between any elements of technological chain;

analysing the material and energy losses at any technological stage;

generating production orders;

generating orders for materials and works orders on the base of production orders, automatically and forwarding the same to the executors;

setting up the MES document flow circulation rules with approval of stages by the personnel in charge;

performing network planning for production works;

controlling the execution of works;

controlling the quality using the process-oriented approach, complying with ISO 9000:2000 international standard;

calculating the manufacturing cost in real time, at each technological stage;

revealing "bottlenecks" of the production – the reasons of growth of the manufacturing cost, wastage, losses, deviations from the terms of execution, etc.;

monitoring of compliance of time and cost of production orders execution with the planned targets;

logging the MES-statistics of operation, downtime, failures and maintenance of equipment;

The T-FACTORY 6 MES represents the production process as a totality of interconnected energy and materials flows. For each element of the flow, it is possible to make a record card (M-resource) in the development system, by specifying of the main technical and cost characteristics. These properties can be readout from the following sources:

controllers and servers of the automated process control system from the factory floor;

relational databases with SQL-interface;

spreadsheets;

OPC-servers;

applications of MS Office®;

manual input.

The MES system allows to account for the cost of those resources whose cost varies during a day (for example, electric energy). For that purpose, in the M-resource card, a supplementary sheet – Pricing is provided.

In the course of manufacturing, the materials and energy are transferred along the technological chains, they undergo transformation, and also losses, refuse and waste occur. Correspondingly, the М-resources of T-FACTORY MES could be interlinked to each other, thus creating supply chains. This makes it possible to monitor the material flows dynamics in real time, register the losses, analyse their reasons and take measures for reduction of losses and waste.

Since the T-FACTORY accounts for the current cost of each material resource, then it is possible to monitor in real time, not only the material flows, but also the cash flows, and to reveal the reasons of the unreasonable growth of manufacturing cost and take measures for its reduction.

A tracking number of the resource can be created in the record card. It makes it possible to trace the route of any lot of produce along the technological chain. At that, data from T-FACTORY 6 EAM and HRM about the equipment applied and the personnel engaged in works are used. All manufacturing data are stored in the real time database SIAD/SQL 6. This way, the production managers obtain full information about the resources of the enterprise, used for execution of orders. This allows to perform analysis of the reasons of defective production and reveal the following:

At which stage of manufacturing the defects occurred?

Which equipment was used in manufacturing of defective products?

Which personnel serviced the equipment?

Where the raw materials were received from?

Where the defective products were shipped to?

The T-FACTORY 6 MES makes it possible to calculate, in real time, the material balances between any components of the technological chain. At that it is possible to allocate unlimited number of categories of the balance, and calculate the cost of each category. It is possible to establish tolerance limits in the system, for each category, and perform automatic alarming in case of excess of the allowable quantity of waste, defects or losses.

The T-Factory MES offers to create production orders (D-resources) for each manufacturing operation. Production orders are activated and executed according to both the human command, and automatically:

in due time;

with a prescribed periodicity;

upon occurrence of an event;

etc.

Based on the activated production orders, the MES system generates shift targets, work orders and material order. Production orders are transferred to the T-FACTORY 6 MES planning and documenting subsystem. Document flow circulation rules allows the authorized executives of the enterprise to approve, cancel or postpone execution of the production orders.

Facilities for network and long-term planning are provided in the T-FACTORY 6 MES. The planning is also possible to be performed in external programs, for example, in the MS Project®.

The T-FACTORY 6 MES server monitors execution of each production order and generate alarms if the time or cost planned were exceeded. The production manager can obtain information about failures in execution of orders in real time.

The T-FACTORY MES normally uses the real time DBMS SIAD/SQL 6 for data storage. However the data may be saved to any common relational databases (MS SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, MS Access, Sybase, Informix etc) through ODBC. For that purpose the SQL-queries builderis available in TRACE MODE IDE.